Bucknell Seniors Engineer Solutions to Critical Water Needs

In the rural town of Larabanga in northern Ghana, clean water is not always accessible. And it often comes at the cost of hours spent walking, waiting and carrying it home. Even then, the water is not always safe to drink. 

This year, Professor Austin Wadle, environmental engineering, advised a Senior Design capstone course, a yearlong, team-based program in which Bucknell’s College of Engineering students partner on real-world projects for external clients or communities. Wadle and their team of four students traveled to Larabanga, a rural town in Northern Ghana's White Volta Basin, to design a well that could offer reliable, year-round access to clean drinking water — and serve as a catalyst for empowering social and economic development. 

Understanding Community Needs

Alessia Cusick '26, environmental engineering, and Rhodenischelah Limage '26, environmental engineering, first became acquainted with the Larabanga community in their junior year during their Bucknell in Ghana experience, a semester-long study abroad program.

"This project really started materializing when we took a field trip to the north of Ghana. The Larabanga community expressed one of their ongoing challenges with a proposed solution and we were eager to take on this opportunity to help support them," says Cusick. 

When Cusick and Limage returned to campus, they reached out to Wadle to develop the idea into a Senior Design project and complete their team with the addition of two fellow environmental engineering seniors — Sean Oakey '26 and Brennan Newcomb '26. In January of their senior year, they returned to Ghana for a nine-day trip to collaborate with the community and begin field work.

"Before work could even begin, we knew it was really important to engage with the community to make sure that we were designing a well that fit their needs, rather than just swooping in and doing what we think is best," says Newcomb. 

The team met with community liaison Fatawu Ibrahim and other community members to determine not only the logistics of the project but to also understand the impact its completion would have on the quality of members' health and lives. "We learned that the women in the community are primarily responsible for fetching water, and they can spend upwards eight hours a day waiting at well locations or walking kilometers to get water," says Oakey. 

Ibrahim, in partnership with the Larabanga Women and Children Empowerment Project, explained that reducing the time required to get water was also a way of freeing up time to improve education, specifically for women and girls in the community. "So it's not just about water," says Limage. "It's this entire humanitarian project, and getting access to clean water is just one of the first steps to developing their community."

Field Work

The central challenge of the project lay not just in digging a well, but in constructing a reliable, sustainable water source that could operate year-round and reduce the costs of importing drinking water. "The government and private-funded projects had already drilled a number of boreholes, but not to an adequate enough depth to survive the dry season," says Oakey. "That's why the community engagement portion of our project was so critical."

Konchonpe Engineering Works, a local engineering firm, conducted a site survey to determine potential well sites. "We also visited the Ghana Water Resource Commission to gather groundwater and hydrogeological data that could help us identify the ideal site for a well," says Newcomb. The visit was a good lesson in Ghanaian data sovereignty and processes — and a step toward determining a well location that could produce a high yield of water while also being easily accessible. 

In Larabanga, the Senior Design team conducted a survey of existing water infrastructure. Their exploration including the examination of both an "ancient well" and a Learning Center Well which had been established through the Larabanga Project, an initiative launched by Professor Nina Banks, economics, in tandem with Fatawu that focuses on community-based development within Larabanga. The community also had access to two community dams, though these open surface ponds were prone to contamination from bacteria, agricultural and industrial activities. 

"A lot of our preliminary work relied on microbiology and analytical chemistry techniques to be able to test and verify what is already embodied knowledge for the people in the community," says Wadle. Namely, the people of Larbanga already knew that certain water sources were contaminated. On-site field testing allowed the team to quantify the presence of E. coli and coliform bacteria, which are indicators of fecal contamination.

With the samples in hand and the culture in mind, the design team returned home — but the work was only just beginning.

In the Lab

Back on campus, the team hunkered down in the Environmental Engineering and Science Laboratory in the Breakiron Engineering Building to further analyze their samples. While turbidity, dissolved oxygen and conductivity could be measured relatively easily on site, the team required access to more complex instruments — such as ion chromatography, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and X-ray fluorescence — to detect and quantify things like minor and trace metals. 

After completing the sample analysis, the team was able to adjust their official design of the well, layout a construction plan and begin applying for grants to fund the construction. 

"This whole experience gave me greater social awareness of how environmental engineering contributes to making the world a better place," says Limage. "It might sound cliche, but we have a real opportunity to positively impact a community. So we want to keep that going."

Because the Senior Design course is offered every year within the College of Engineering, Wadle hopes to continue and maintain the project with new groups of students that can return to Larabanga. In the meantime, Wadle can use the lessons from this project to shape the classroom learning experience.

Wadle notes that the work also produces real-world datasets that can be used in advanced environmental engineering coursework, providing students with hands-on experience in groundwater chemistry, microbial contamination and field-based problem-solving. They add that the project challenges students to think beyond the United States and consider how geology, water systems and human needs intersect in different global contexts.